John Nobles, Adam Gullion, Jonathan Aguilar
2025-04-21
-Statcast is an automated camera tool that was developed by ChyronHego, Trackman, and MLB
-It helps teams and players analyze work towards improving their athletic potential
-It was installed in all 30 MLB stadiums in 2015
-Statcast has fundamentally changed the way the game of baseball is played as it introduced statistics that changed strategy all across MLB.
Before we talk about Statcast metrics about a players hitting philosphy, we need to talk about woba and xwobacon.
The stat woba stands for weighted on base average.
According to Fangraphs, a rule of thumb about woba is
-Excellent .400
-Above Average .340
-Average .320
The stat xwobacon stands for expected weighted on base average on contact. Think of it as the potential stat.
Launch angle refers to how high or low a ball was hit in degrees.
Exit Velocity stands for the speed in Mph a ball was hit by a batter.
-Generally speaking, exit velocity isn’t affected whether the hit ball was a ground or fly ball.
ff_avg_speed)ff_avg_spin)k_percent)woba)The fast-ball is a pitcher’s most used pitch, and as such, we decided to focus on the effects Statcast has had on the fast-ball.
Source: Fangraphs
Strikeouts are important to a pitchers plan to limit runs and as such, they work towards increasing their strikeout percentage in an effort to succeed.
Given that a higher strikeout percentage correlates to a lower woba, having a quality Fast-ball to increase strikeout percentage decreases the woba.
Pitchers have always utilized foreign substances to put onto the baseball to get an advantage. However, with the introduction of spin rate, pitchers were able to more effectively optimize their ability to cheat.
Pitchers utilized resin-based Spider Tack to illegally increase their spin rate
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = hard_hit_percent ~ year, data = hitting)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -29.630 -4.425 0.428 4.878 22.575
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) -1.470e+03 1.415e+02 -10.39 <2e-16 ***
## year 7.473e-01 7.005e-02 10.67 <2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 7.446 on 1373 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.07655, Adjusted R-squared: 0.07587
## F-statistic: 113.8 on 1 and 1373 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Limitations from the Statcast data set that we utilized is that it doesn’t include bat-tracking data as it was only launched in the middle of 2023 and does not retroactively track for previous years.
Futhermore, this Statcast data only includes qualified hitters in MLB and not in MiLB, NPB, KBO, or any other baseball leagues.
In conclusion, Statcast has changed the way the game of baseball is played, analyzed, and optimized through hitters optimizing Launch Angles, Exit Velocities, upon much more while pitchers focus more on Strikeout percentages, Fast-ball speed,& spin while using whatever possible to get an advantage.